'I'm a Bear in a Courtroom'

In the ruminations about Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial temperament and sometimes brusque style, the judge has offered up her own self-characterizations.

“I’m a bear in a courtroom,” Ms. Sotomayor said frankly in a video recording of a 1993 speech that was released Monday night by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ms. Sotomayor, now President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, made the comments in a question-and-answer session with Yale law students after a speech about legal ethics and public service (more video clips about that coming up).

Recounting how law firms had tried to pry special insights about her personality and thinking from her law clerks, Ms. Sotomayor suggested that some aspects of her style were already “public knowledge,” like her bearishness on the bench. “I like people to be on time,” she continued. “I want you to know the federal rules of evidence, etc.”

Video

'I Am Struggling With That Every Day'

During a 1993 question and answer session with students from Yale Law School, Judge Sotomayor repeatedly lamented the role that personnel connections inevitably play in professional advancement.

The question-and-answer session was also the latest indication of Ms. Sotomayor’s strong sympathies for good-government causes like restrictions on lobbying and campaign finance, rules that many conservative jurists often view as clashing with the First Amendment.

She commended the students to Common Cause, a government ethics group that advocates tighter lobbying and campaign finance rules, and she gave a series of earnest answers to questions about potentially compromising private benefits to lawyers who move between private practice and public office, or even judicial clerkships.

She repeatedly lamented the role that personnel connections inevitably play in professional advancement, and she laid out her own personal rule for recusing herself from cases involving someone she knows.

“I am struggling with that every day,” she said, “And the rule that I passed for myself—and it is not the rule on the bench, for other judges— is, if there is someone with whom I have had a relationship where I have chosen to have lunch or dinner or attend a social event with them then that is an individual who is a close enough friend that I will recuse myself from involvement with them.”

People she meets without seeking out their company, at formal or group events, would not pose a probable conflict, she explained. “These questions do remain very close and I don’t have the answers for it,” she said. “I have every day attempted to draw that line.”

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'Yale Is a Bit Different'

Judge Sonia Sotomayor discussed affirmative action during a 1993 question and answer session with students from Yale Law School.

On the subject of affirmative action, a central focus so far in the debate over her confirmation, Ms. Sotomayor told the students she understood some conservative arguments against it. Recalling a constitutional law class she took with Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr.— now her colleague on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals — Judge Sotomayor said he had made a point about colleges like Princeton and Yale that “has always stayed with me.”

“How can you call a minority who has graduated from that elite institution disadvantaged in our society?,” she said. “And it is not a question without some merit. Because where you come from you may have been disadvantaged but you may not be when you finish the process.”

But in the end, she argued in a meandering answer, it was still important to include racial and ethnic minorities at places like Yale Law School. “In the end you I think the answer, ultimately, still remains the unsatisfying one, which is that you have to open the doors to institutions like this one, you have to get more diverse people here so that the contact-building will spread more widely.”

i do not know hwy she just does not come out and say she is a judical activist and she rules not by the court of law but by the race, color or social economic status in which the person or persons are raised under the white man’s rule.

There’s obviously no honesty to be had from anyone who sees anything revealing of Ms. Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy in the New Haven firefighter test ruling, which was a decision by a 3 judge appellate court to kick the case up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court took the case but hasn’t issued a ruling yet.

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